Florian Hagemann -- May 5, 2026
I was born in 2007 and have now lived for 18 years. When I was young, I still listened to audio cassettes and played on my brother’s old PS2. It is safe to say that the world, as I knew it in childhood, has changed completely. Now, as a young adult, I face challenges that no generation before me has had to confront in quite the same form. Artificial intelligence and social media have shaped my generation profoundly, both for better and for worse. I want to examine what exactly has changed in our lives, how this has affected us, and what we can learn from philosophy in order to better understand and orient ourselves within it.
Like most of my generation, I grew up on the internet, partly due to the pandemic keeping everyone inside. Social media became one of the main forms of socialisation and with this boom came a shift in social media as it had existed before that: The shift from longform content (e.g. YouTube videos, books) to short and algorithmically chosen content (e.g. TikTok, Instagram Reels). This shift has profoundly changed how content on the internet is made by shifting the focus away from the viewer and towards the algorithm of the platform.
One of the more recent changes our society has experienced was the rise of AI – or more precisely the rise of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and large language models (LLMs). The discussion around AI is huge and spans multiple different topics, but I want to focus on how it is used by my generation in particular. One of the main uses of AI has been in education. While some people use AI as a tool to help them learn and a small minority of Gen-Z even boycotts AI due to ecological reasons, I see that more and more are using it to do the work that they need to do to learn. It replaces the effort that they need to put in, by doing the tasks for them, which undermines the main goal of education: teaching critical thinking.
But what is critical thinking? Critical thinking is the use of reason to question and evaluate information and arguments. This is one of the most important capacities a person can develop. It is not only essential for understanding the world around us, but also forms a foundation of morality. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) connects reason to morality in his work “Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals” (1785). He argues that the moral laws are a direct consequence of reason. For Kant something being moral means that it is a principle that you would want everyone to follow. This is called the categorical imperative – “categorical” meaning it has to be always followed and “imperative” meaning that it is a command.
We can now see why the over-use of AI is something dangerous: It hinders the ability to properly assess what is moral. And this ability is critical, because our personal moral laws are not something that exist predetermined in the universe but are laws that we give ourselves and within this lies the dignity of every human. These laws are created personally, but due to the categorical imperative and the fact that we all share reason as the universal source of morality all align with a general moral law. This use of reason to give ourselves laws is our autonomy. If we can’t use reason to give ourselves moral laws, we allow our feelings, religion, institutions, or upbringing to dictate our moral laws, undermining our dignity. This would be called heteronomy.
Social media is another example of the modern shift from autonomy to heteronomy. While there always was an algorithm that recommended you videos to watch, nowadays platforms like TikTok use a format where you just endlessly scroll and see videos that the algorithm thinks you want to watch. This skips the thinking behind what video would interest you and comparison of different videos – formation of preferences and reflecting on what content you consume becomes outsourced. It shifts the creators focus to creating something that grabs your attention as fast as possible. It reduces your autonomy and risks heteronomy.
The unique problem our generation faces is that our autonomy is under constant attack. The constant pressure towards heteronomy makes ethics and critical thinking important, because we need them in order to remain autonomous and to keep our dignity. It will require a conscious effort to resist mindless consumption and overreliance on external tools.